Oben could not stop thinking about what just happened. The day was going fine, he had had a good bout of meetings with his clients. Everything was going great in fact. But his heart dropped when he went back into his office.

Oben had a neat array of fountain pens, always on the right side of his desk. They were color-coded. And each pen was aligned neatly, the capped nib facing his revolving chair. But when he came back into his office, he noticed that one of the pens was missing.

It was his midnight blue pen, one that he had just gotten this summer.

His mind started racing as he began to think about all the places that he might have dropped his pen.

It couldn’t be that far from my office – I never take these pens off my desk unless I have to! He thought.

So, he began searching. Oben began by shifting the table to see underneath it. But then, exasperated, he began emptying the drawers. The notebooks that he threw out made heavy thuds against the floor and the furniture. People from outside his office started noticing until a colleague, Roma, who he was dating opened the door.

“Oben, is everything alright?” But then she stopped.

Oben was frantically now skimming through the shelf behind his chair, clearing all the papers and files out onto the floor.

“It was just here! I don’t believe how it could be anywhere else!”

This was not the first time that Roma and several other colleagues had seen Oben ‘lose his mind’ over very small things. He had had a similar breakdown when he noticed that a paper weight was missing.  

And Roma had only borrowed it. Well, she should have told him beforehand, but she thought, that’s nothing to freak out over, right?

Hearing the commotion, a colleague of Oben’s summoned the HR. Safe to say, Oben was not liked. But it took more than 10 minutes for the HR team to convince him to join them in the conference room.

Oben felt exasperated. But he also knew he was in trouble. He had promised them that he would be taking regular sessions with his shrink. But, this time he could not control himself.

Because of the damage that was caused to the shelf and the desk and the ‘disruptiveness’ of Oben’s actions, he was given a 2 week suspension from work. This was not the first time Oben had had such a mental breakdown.

But the HR representative’s message this time was clear:

‘Get your act together, or do not join the office again.”

But Oben felt hopeless, powerless.

2 weeks later, Oben returned. He had had made an active effort to not lose it anymore. Roma met him at the door and greeted him with a donut. While Roma and Oben had had conversations within this time, he told her that he was busy working on himself.

‘So, what’s up? How do you feel?’ Roma inquired.

‘Everything’s fine, Roma. Absolutely fine!’ Oben cheerily replied, as he began arranging his pens neatly on the right side of his desk.